I talked extensively to Hyper9 to determine if their product would be a good fit for the SMB, as most of their marketing literature is geared towards helping to manage thousands of VMs not necessarily 100s of VMs. My thoughts before talking to them is yes it would be useful, but after talking to them, I discovered some key facts that would help an SMB decide on whether or not to invest in Hyper9 which is a tool to allow you to query the VMware virtual environment for issues as well as general information.

Hyper9 has a Dashboard that reports on the state of canned queries. This dashboard would contain items like: are there orphaned VMs, existing Snapshots, VMs that span multiple VMFS, etc.

Hyper9 has the ability to automatically trend the results of queries over time in a graphical form.

Hyper9 can save Queries within their dashboard so that custom queries to the virtual environment can be viewed

Hyper9 can also ingest logs and data from other systems, index it, and make it searchable via user queries.

Hyper9 has a programmable interface for including the results of Hyper9 queries within the SMBs own scripts (Powershell and SOAP API)

What is most interesting of these features, for an SMB, are the canned queries that make up the dashboard and other reports. These by themselves give SMBs a view into their virtual environment they may not already have through any scripts or existing tools.

One of the things I often do for my customers is to immediately setup tools that trend specific things over time, such as bandwidth and application utilization. For VMware ESX and ESXi, such trends tend to be within VMware vCenter already, yet there are many aspects of the virtual environment that are not within VMware vCenter that can be trended; such as the number of VMs created by day, the VMs that have snapshots after a backup, the union of VMs with out of date VMware Tools and those that have updated patches. These are just some of the things that Hyper9 can trend. In essence, if you can query it, you can trend it.

Trends can also be useful for showing the CTO how the systems are performing and if there are any problems that recur regularly. This ability within Hyper9 can provide necessary historical views that will also aid with capacity and other planning tasks.

If you are an SMB, take a look at Hyper9, it can provide you with more insights into your virtual environment.